This is less egregious to me than mandatory entrance fees for public lands, which are often an order of magnitude higher on a per-person basis than these picnic fees. These fees likely don’t even cover the administration costs of the reservation system.
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Noisebridge was founded in 2008. I was there… It was the only hackerspace in San Francisco for many years. So, not ten years ago and not plural. Nice hyperbole though.
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One thing that I see all the time in articles about gentrification is neighborhoods being described as “traditionally___” when in fact their demographics have changed before. This article talks about the “non-white traditional residents”, implying they have some time honored hold on the place.
The Mission District has only been “non-white” since the 80s, not exactly an epoch.
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Of course, what people reading this thread don’t realize is that the SF Parks department is broke. The last I heard (a few years back), they couldn’t even afford regular park maintenance on most city parks anymore. They only sent out teams to do triage, dealing with the worst issues, and let overall maintenance not happen. This “money grab” by the city is probably to actually, you know, pay for the upkeep of the city parks.
But, hey, what do I know? Anger forward!
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Funny, they just spent north of $20M renovating Dolores Park. Strange thing for a broke department to do.
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I guess SF residents should ask what budgets money is coming from. I live in Oakland so it is a rather distant concern outside of our own haters of all tech workers building up steam here.
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Walk? Not bloody likely.
I’ll take a litter.
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Difficult to enforce though. A chap might evade park gates by being delivered by Amazon drone.
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That’s missing the point. Noisebridge was part of a larger movement that
certainly began well over a decade ago. There were cool underground art
shows, including a really cool one that was a photoshoot about Norweigan
Satanists. Even great places like the endangered CounterPulse were actually
gentrifying both the working class as well as Latinos who called the
Mission home.
In other words, the Mission has been on it’s current path for well over a
decade and maybe closer to two decades. And if you were part of the arts
and technology community (as I was) then you - along with the bridge and
tunnel crowd looking for dive bars, and hipster coffee shops and people who
just wanted to live near decent transit - were gentrifying the Mission.
Gentrification is a natural part of the growth and change in cities. But
rent control, prop 13, and a massive underbuilding of housing and
infrastructure in the entire bay area have made it completely devestating
here. When I moved here, gentrification was pushing people into the
Excelsior or maybe Daly City. Now Pleasanton is a stretch for many.
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“To book a computer, please complete the on line registration form.”
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I’m giving it a matter of months until the SFPD shoots a houseless minority for trespassing on a private square of “grass space”. They’ll probably claim that the houseless person flailed at them while sleeping in the grass and looked to possibly be reaching for one of the police officers pointed firearms while they dreamt.
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Someone should organize a sit-in to flood the park with non paying normal people. I’d donate to help make that happen even if it’s on the other side of the world from me. I’ve been to that park, it’s an amazing spot. And the whole point of parks is that they’re OPEN FOR EVERYONE!
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Lolzer @ term that that makes poor people savages.
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While the gentrification of SF is ridiculous right now and has priced me out of my hometown renting park space is pretty standard. A cursory search shows that Chicago, Seattle, and Houston all have similar park rentals for similar prices. This allows larger groups to use public spaces easily. It should probably be cheaper but that’s a problem everywhere and not just in Dolores park. If someone finds evidence of tech assholes abusing this system to rent a section of park constantly then it’s time to complain but this system is standard practice for most public parks. You can even see on the map in the article that it’s only a few sections of the park that are available for rentals. There’s a lot of problems right now in SF but this really doesn’t seem like one.
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Right ok… gonna go against the grain here… and say I’m for this, or not that against it at least?
Those green areas are the permit required areas. So there are still giant swaths of park that you can use free of charge, but if you have an event or party or whatever, you can “rent” one of the green areas. And that, I’m for. But I would totally watch that the green areas don’t increase, and try to get something on a city council agenda that there be a fixed ratio of public:rentable space for all parks that participate in rental programs.
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Is it possible to use the non-green areas for a picnic?
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The Dolores predicament was initially contemplated by a high school student in 1982.
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I think so? You just can’t “reserve” them. This seems a non-issue to me? In Toronto we have an extensive public park system, and many BBQ/picnic areas that you need to pay to reserve. But lots and lots of free to use areas that you don’t need to pay to reserve. You can roll the dice and hope to use a BBQ area if its free, but if you want to make sure its available you pay the fee. This seems like that to me? Only more expensive… our rates start at $84 for up to 200 people. 
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But smoking is fine? How times have changed. It tickles me to watch Bruce Willis light up in the airport in Die Harder and no one bats an eyelid.
It’s only a non-issue when the rest of the park remains usable for all activities, including groups blocking a place for a long picnic.
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